To Imagine That There Was a Carpeaux…

To imagine that there was a Carpeaux before the invention of the computer gives one pause. An active reader, over the course of a decade, produces thousands upon thousands of notes. Three or four decades of study, therefore, amount to a volume that no human mind is capable of comprehending, unless one engages in a constant process of rereading and reorganization, a process that never ends because there are always old notes to revisit, and there are always new ideas and new connections to be made through this revisitation. A computer, if used wisely, makes research tremendously easier: a task that might take an hour is sometimes reduced to minutes. Even so, it seems almost impossible to match the feat of those ancient scholars, whose notes were tucked away in their own thick tomes—something that, today, sends a shiver down one’s spine.